'Lost' recap: Jacob and his brother resolve their mommy issues in 'Across the Sea'

Jacob gets his daily briefing from "The West Wing's" CJ Cregg.
Well, now we know why Jacob and his brother are so special. Unlike everybody else who has ever set foot on the Island, their issues are with Mommy, not Daddy. Last night's episode, "Across the Sea," the third-to-last of the series and the long-anticipated Jacob/Man In Black origin story, was full of bad acting (by everyone except guest star Allison Janey), cheesy dialogue, woo-woo mysticism and cheap-looking special effects and sets. Yet somehow it worked and managed to tie up some remaining mysteries while deepening others.
The creators get audacity points for ditching all of the main characters with so little time left to go, and though this wasn't nearly as strong as "Ab Aeterno," the Richard Alpert origin episode, "Across the Sea" did the job it needed to.

So a hugely pregnant, Jennifer Lopez-looking woman washes ashore from, what else, a shipwreck. She's midwifed by the Janey character, who is never named but is listed as "Mother." Baby Jacob is born, but there's a surprise twin close behind, for whom the actual mother never picked a name. Can we just go ahead and call him Esau? Also, was I alone in looking forward to the possibility that a plume of black smoke would come barrelling out instead of a baby?

Anyway, Mother kills the woman with a rock to the head -- apparently the ancient-Island precursor to the "gunshot to the torso" method of killing later popularized by, well, just about everyone -- and raises Jacob and Not-Jacob as her own (apparently weaning the infants on coconut milk?), nurturing their fascination with games and lecturing ponderously about the evil of mankind, the purity of the Island and so on. She also dresses them unsubtly in thematically convenient black and white outfits and gives them Jonas Brothers haircuts centuries if not millenia before their relevance to popular culture. The Island is a magical place, after all.

Jacob, the mama's boy, is loyal, but Esau runs off to live with the other survivors of their real mother's shipwreck, who have discovered the same miraculous electromagnetic anomalies that would later fascinate both the Dharma scientists and the Insane Clown Posse. Esau wants to leave the Island, despite his mother's insistence that there is nothing across the sea. Thirty years later, without a gray hair on her head, she shows up, knocks her adopted son unconscious and sabotages his efforts to build the donkey wheel that harnesses the Island's magical light and water, whatever that means.

He returns to their Garden-of-Eden cave and murders her. Jacob comes back and drags him to the pool of forbidden glowy badness (insert acknowledgement of further Book of Genesis imagery), throws him in, and the Smoke Monster is born. The Oedipal drama ends with Jacob placing his adopted mother's and brother's bodies side-by-side, giving us our Adam and Eve, finally resolving a Big Mystery from season one, and pretty cleverly at that.

The cyclical nature of events on the Island has been alluded to before -- there are always Others, there are always crazy women in the jungle -- and as it turns out, the further back you go, the same patterns appear, only to be repeated across the centuries. People come, people fight, whole populations get slaughtered, bad things happen when you try to tap into the Island's power, two seemingly powerful figures struggle for control. Sure, questions remain -- like, where did the Woman come from? -- but the point of "Across the Sea," I believe, is that the answers don't matter. Or as the Woman put it: "Every question I answer will just lead you to another question." Take that, fans.

Randomly:

-Is it safe to assume the glowing cave is the eventual site of the Temple?

-Smoke Monster physics update. He can assume the body of any person who has died on the Island, apparently, but has no need for the body itself.

-Smokey sees dead people, so that explains why young Jacob keeps popping up in the jungle in the present day, even if the rules of their game are still murky and likely will remain so.

-"Across the Sea" wasn't about free will versus destiny so much as where your free will leads you -- as in, a choice between evil and crazy. Mother was correct about the evil of other people on the Island and the outside world, but she's clearly dishonest, manipulative and bat-feces insane. Which twin made the right choice?